The impact of brain-drain in country ranking: the case of computer science

The scientific impact and rankings of individual persons, institutions, or nations are very important for their international recognition and prestige. At the same time, they are also vital for the governments, businesses and trusts which must decide scientific priorities and funding. In this paper we show that the ranking of a country changes significantly when we take into consideration its scientific personnel that has migrated abroad (i.e., brain-drain). Given that immigrant scientists are considered recoverable assets who can always return home, we believe that governments, businesses and trusts should anticipate immigrant scholars when deciding their scientific priorities, optimizing their research allocations, re-orienting their research support, or augmenting research productivity.